Rochester, New York police arrest, pepper spray suicidal 9-year-old girl, body camera footage shows
9 officers to deal with one suicidal little girl non-criminal call! Pathetic cowards!
Rochester, New York – Rochester police released two body-camera videos on Sunday that show officers restraining a distraught 9-year-old girl who was handcuffed and sprayed with what police referred to as a chemical “irritant.”
Before releasing the videos, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren expressed her concern for the “child that was harmed during this incident that happened on Friday.”
“I have a 10-year-old child, so she’s a child, she’s a baby. This video, as a mother, is not anything you want to see,” Warren said.
At a press release on Sunday, Warren said she had spoken to the girl’s mom “from one mother to another,” according to local news station WROC-TV.
She informed reporters that she is “very concerned about how this young girl was handled by our police department.”
A total of 9 officers and supervisors responded to the report of “family trouble” involving a suicidal little girl on Friday. The girl could be heard in the body-camera footage from officers on the scene screaming frantically for her father because the officers had restrained her.
At the Sunday press release, Deputy Police Chief Andre Anderson described the girl as suicidal.
“She indicated she wanted to kill herself and she wanted to kill her mom,” he mentioned.
Officers tried to force the girl into a patrol vehicle, however, she pulled away and kicked at them. In an announcement on Saturday, the police department stated this action “required” an officer to take the girl all the way down to the ground. Then, the department said, “for the minor’s safety and at the request of the custodial parent on the scene,” the kid was handcuffed and put in the back of a police car as they waited for an ambulance to arrive.
Police stated the girl disobeyed instructions to place her feet inside the vehicle. An officer was then “required” to spray an “irritant” in the handcuffed girl’s face, the department stated on Saturday.
An officer is heard in the video saying, “Just spray her at this point.”
She’s heard screaming, and an officer says, “I got her. I got her.”
At Sunday’s press conference, Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan described the irritant as pepper spray. She declined to defend the officers’ actions.
“I’m not going to stand here and tell you that for a 9-year-old to have to be pepper-sprayed is OK. It’s not,” Herriott-Sullivan said. “I don’t see that as who we are as a department, and we’re going to do the work we have to do to ensure that these kinds of things don’t happen.”
Police mentioned the girl was ultimately taken to Rochester General Hospital, “where she received the services and care that she needed,” and was later released into the care of her family.
The Rochester Police Department has faced scrutiny because of the death of Daniel Prude last year after officers from the department put a hood over his head and pressed his face into the pavement.
9 officers to deal with one suicidal little girl non-criminal call! Pathetic cowards!
